Coinciding with the start of the LinuxWorld Expo here in New York, the KDE Team has announced today that KDE 2.1-beta2 is ready for your enjoyment. The attached press release goes into the details (and I can't help but throw in this cool screenshot of the new Konqueror splash page), and lists a number of pre-compiled packages. This all in prelude to the scheduled release of KDE 2.1 in mid-February. So what are you waiting for -- startcha 'loadin'. Update: 02/02 10:39 AM by N: Link to Debian packages now included.

DATELINE JANUARY 31, 2001

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New Beta KDE Release for Linux Desktop Ships

New Beta Version of Leading Linux Desktop Offers New Theme
Manager, Image Viewer and IDE

January 31, 2001 (The INTERNET). The KDE
Team today announced the release of KDE 2.1-beta2, a powerful, modular,
Internet-enabled desktop. KDE 2.1 constitutes the second major release of
the KDE 2 series, which is the next generation of theaward-winning KDE 1
series. KDE is the work product of hundreds of dedicated developers
originating from over 30 countries.

This is the last planned beta release before the scheduled release of
KDE 2.1 on February 19, 2001. KDE 2.1 offers a number of additions,
enhancements and fixes over KDE 2.0.1, the last stable KDE release which
shipped on December 5, 2000. The major additions and improvements are:

KHTML,
the HTML widget, now has a special 'transitional mode' which greatly improves
its handling of malformed HTML pages.

In additon, KHTML now has greatly
improved Java support. Support for Java security (JDK 1.2 or
compatible is now required) as well as Java over SSL using the JSSE classes
have been added.

Drag'n'drop has been improved; now a URL can be dropped on a web page
and the Location label can be dragged.

"Favorite icon" support has been added, for displaying a website's icon
in the Location bar, in bookmarks and in the taskbar.

Devices can be displayed in the directory view and mounted on demand.

File-name completion has been improved and in-place file renaming
added.

Additional protocols supported include a LAN browser (lan:/ and rlan:/), a
floppy browser (floppy:/) and a CD browser (cd:/), which includes
CDDB support.

It now stores bookmarks
using the standard XBEL
bookmark format; a new bookmark editor complements the new standard.

Auto-proxy configuration and support for proxies requiring
authentication have been implemented.

KDevelop, a C/C++ integrated
development environment, has been added to the core KDE distribution. The
version being shipped, 1.4beta2, is the first version of KDevelop to
make use of the KDE 2 libraries and integrate completely with the KDE 2
desktop.

A new and much-anticipated theme manager, as well as a LILO configuration
tool, have been added to KControl, the KDE control panel. The control panel
now lists all available I/O slaves.

Many icons have been improved. In addition, semi-transparency
(alpha-blending) has been implemented on small images and icons.

The panel (Kicker) has enjoyed significant improvements.
An external taskbar has been included (familiar to
KDE 1 users), support for sub-panels has been added (which can be separately
sized and positioned), an improved external pager (Kasbar) has been added,
and support for applets has been improved (including support forWindowMaker dock applets).

ARts, the KDE 2 multimedia
architecture, now offers a control module to configure sampling rate and
output devices, increased performance, improved user interfaces and a
number of additional effects and filters.

Pixie, an image viewer/editor, has been added to the Graphics package.

KAB, the KDE address book, now provides regular expression searching
of the address database and can export the database to HTML files.

For developers, a number of classes have been added to the core
libraries, including a class for undo/redo support (KCommand) and
a class for editing list boxes (KEditListBox).

Many additional improvements, particularly to KMail, the mail client,
and KNode, the news reader. A more complete list of changes is
availablehere.

KDE 2.1-beta2 includes the core KDE libraries, the core desktop environment,
as well as the over 100 applications from the other
standard base KDE packages: Administration, Games, Graphics, Multimedia,
Network, Personal Information Management (PIM), Toys and Utilities. In
addition, this release includes the development packages KDevelop, Bindings,
an SDK and Documentation.KOffice is not included in this release.

Some distributors choose to provide binary packages of KDE for certain
versions of their distribution. Some of these binary packages for KDE 2.1-beta2
will be available for free download underhttp://ftp.kde.org/unstable/distribution/2.1-beta2/rpm/
or under the equivalent directory at one of the many KDE ftp servermirrors. Please note that the
KDE team is not responsible for these packages as they are provided by third
parties -- typically, but not always, the distributor of the relevant
distribution.

KDE 2.1-beta2 requires qt-2.2.1, the free version of which is available
from the above locations usually under the name qt-x11-2.2.1, although
qt-2.2.3 is recommended. KDE 2.1-beta2 will not work with versions of Qt
older than 2.2.1.

Please check the servers periodically for pre-compiled packages for other
distributions. More binary packages will become available over the
coming days and weeks.

About KDE

KDE is an independent, collaborative project by hundreds of developers
worldwide to create a sophisticated, customizable and stable desktop environment
employing a component-based, network-transparent architecture.
KDE is working proof of the power of the Open Source "Bazaar-style" software
development model to create first-rate technologies on par with
and superior to even the most complex commercial software.

Trademarks Notices.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Unix is a registered trademark of The Open Group.
Trolltech and Qt are trademarks of Trolltech AS.
Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.

The RedHat RPMs for the 6x branch don't include the kde-network rpm's. Because I uninstalled all of the kde rpm's, I no longer have kmail, kpm, etc. I tried the old 2.0.1 rpm's, but I get dependency errors.

Is there a place where I can get a good kde-network rpm for RedHat 6.2?

I went back and tried the kdenetwork rpm from the 7.0 branch. It didn't complain, but I haven't extensively tested it out. Not surprisingly, it looks like more effort is going into the 7.0 rpm's than the 6.x rpms.

I don't use lilo at all, it is lacking many of the features of grub, including an ultra nifty interface, and an emergency console mode with bash like syntax, allowing you to do some recovery stuff without even having an emergency boot disk!

Also, lilo is part of linux, and although people who use other OSs sometimes use it, it isn't INCLUDED with those OSs, so they will be more likely to use the built in one. Boot selectors, are not particaulary complex pieces of software (at least when compared, to say, KDE) :)

Maybe, instead of only being a LILO program, it could be something like KBootLoader. It could have compatibility with various bootloaders, including LILO, Grub, and the BSD bootloaders. It would do all the basics (adding/removing an OS or partition, timeouts etc.), and then have a seperate part for bootloader-specific options (ex. LILO's lba32 and prompt options).

That way, it would be a program that would be applicable with more UNIX/UNIX-like systems, rather than being a LILO-only solution.

AS all KDE apps are qt apps, you just have to recompile your QT with the render extension (you need a new freetype2 and an Xfree-4.02+ with the render extension) and then it just WORKS.
No internal support in KDE needed, though I think in KDE2.1final, the antialiassing will be made configurable by GUI when available...

but can we expect to have a themable and perhaps shadowed mouse-cursor in the future? or who's task is it to implement that? (xfree,qt or kde).

i really want colored (not just monochrome-cursors) and i would like to change the "hotX-, hotY-position" of the cursor. the best would be cursors with 8bit alphachannel. i see no reason not to implement this!

what i find good is: the new Application-icons! (specially in the Startmenu) the old icons where very bad!!! are there so few people designing the icon? do u need help?

I believe the mouse cursor is controlled by X, but I'm not sure. On a side note, Qt/Embedded has a nice drop shadow on its mouse cursor.

While we're on the subject of pretty things, another cool effect would be drop shadows on popup menus. I noticed this in ssh.com's client for Windows and it looks quite good. I'm not exactly sure how possible this is though. I know some Qt, and I was thinking a wrapper to the popup menu could do it. But then what if the area under the popup menu changes (ie scrolls or something) ? The shadow would need to redraw. It sounds like an insane amount of work, but the ssh guys pulled it off quite easily with Windows, and it's not even a natural feature there.

I've asked for this, too, and this is the answer that I got: X does not support alpha channel (transparency). There fore, shadows are not possible at all. Period. Also, cursors are one bit, meaning they can only be black&white. Not grayscale, black&white. Very sad, but true.

But not too long ago, a hero named Keith Packard created something revolutionary: The XRender extension (which finally makes Anti-Aliased text feasible). I do not know though, whether that has any meaning for general alpha capabilities of X or not. But on Keith's homepage, I HAVE already seen (semi-)transparent windows. So at least, there seems to be somebody working on it!

as well as faster pcs with more ram.? i think that more stable applications, which are using low system resources, are more necessity than nice icons and transparent cursors and shadows. for, example the most "stable" and usable kde application - konqueror - cannot be still compared with ms ie.